I do hope that someone is keeping a list of elected Republicans who a) supported Trump's baseless attacks on US democracy, b) said nothing, or c) repudiated him.
And for (c), if they did so *before* the election was called for Biden or after
We're likely to face an unprecedented situation where the incumbent refuses to concede. Although it may not be necessary, things would certainly be easier if Republicans viewed the election as legitimate.
How uphill of a battle will this be? Well, I ran a study with @DG_Rand...
Study was run on Prolific & Lucid on Friday. In total, we have 509 Biden voters & 218 Trump voters. The samples are *not* nationally representative and a bit small. But, some fairly clear results came out.
A key initial Q is about people's priors. Do Trump voters believe it is *unlikely* that Biden won?
The answer is yes.
Reminder: This study was run on Friday when Biden was already well ahead & very likely to win. That he would win the popular vote was *never* in question.
The following may be of interest to those who use Prolific and/or Lucid for surveys.
Ran a study yesterday about election-related opinions (plus some other stuff - data is a bit depressing, coming tomorrow) using Lucid & Prolific's "nationally representative" sample function...
Both sources use quota-matching to filter people into studies who match U.S. demo's on age, gender, ethnicity, and (for Lucid) region. However, there were some notable differences and similarities between the samples.
(Note: Target N for each was 500, study was ~10 min long.)
I included a very simple initial attention/bot check: "Puppy is to dog as kitten is to _____?" with an open-ended text box to respond. This came at the very start. Two other fairly simple attention checks came later in the survey. We also asked directly if ppl responded randomly.
Our paper "Fighting COVID-19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy nudge intervention" is now in press at Psych Science!
I’m super proud of this paper - but first, a thread on the results.
A key question is why people share misinformation on social media in the first place. If we can understand this, we might be able to develop interventions to slow it down. This becomes increasingly important in the context of a global pandemic.
Thought I would share the backstory behind this one, which I think is interesting. Pertains to open science... and also open-*minded* science. (See what I did there)
Wim's work was absolutely seminal to my initiation into the field. My first ever experiment (an undergrad research course) was an extension of his 2008 Cognition paper.
I was (still am) a very big fan.
BUT, my master's work ended up being quite critical of some of his claims..
We submitted it to Cognition & Wim reviewed it somewhat harshly, but also fairly. And I know it was him because he *signs his reviews* (here's the open science part)
New working paper! "On the belief that beliefs should change according to evidence: Implications for conspiratorial, moral, paranormal, political, religious, and science beliefs" psyarxiv.com/a7k96
Read this thread if you're curious about how I (almost) fucked this one up.
First, I'll briefly explain the key finding.
In essence, we show that "actively open-minded thinking about evidence" (AOT-E) - that is, self-reporting that you think beliefs and opinions *should* change according to evidence - is a really strong correlate of lots of things.
IMO, that's cool and important (read the paper if you're interested)... but let's put that aside and focus on how I almost fucked this one up.
The post got >750 comments. I have since tested the most sensible of the suggestions (thread).
Study was run on Lucid for Academics on an American sample (N=450). I'm reporting Democrat v. Republican here, but results are the same if I used continuous liberal v conservative likert scales.
The primary result is this: I was only able to identify a single item that Republican's were closer to scientists than Democrats: "Nuclear power is a safe and viable source of energy."
(I used a 7-point scale, but coding is just the prop of people who agree with scientists)